A Mood

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich — a poem card from Justes Mots

A introspective meditation on unexplained sadness and a vague sense of ancestral sorrow or loss that defies clear articulation. The poem compares this emotional damage to nature's pain when a flowering branch breaks. It captures the experience of depression or grief without obvious cause.

A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness--
Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness;
A fear that is not fear, a pain that has not pain's insistence;
A sense of longing, or of loss, in some foregone existence;
A subtle hurt that never pen has writ nor tongue has spoken--
Such hurt perchance as Nature feels when a blossomed bough is broken.…

Themes: sympathy · grief · reflection · long-distance